When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely we need to supervise it, and ultimately what its real-world impact will turn out to be. Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute argues that we lack adequate methods for measuring machine… Source When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text th...

Modern computer systems are quite fascinating. They are highly complex, run a lot of software, and their performance characteristics are hard or impossible to predict. Earlier this year, I gave a lecture on benchmarking, which for lack of generic and always-applicable advice, I started with a brainstorming session about its pitfalls. Since systems have become so complex that we rarely know what happens exactly. We are prone to simply guess what’s going on. Or rather, we should hypothesize a...

Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews

TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they’ve built over the weekend. Sometimes it’s a chatbot. Sometimes it’s an internal workflow. Sometimes i...

I’ve done my share of system design interviews over the years. Some went my way, and others didn’t. One thing stayed the same: transaction isolation almost always came up whenever the problem involved an online system . When the requirements call for a CP system , I usually reach for a PostgreSQL-compatible NewSQL database such as Aurora PostgreSQL, DSQL, or CockroachDB. Andy Pavlo and Matthew Aslett define NewSQL as relational databases that aim for NoSQL-like scale while keeping SQL ...

In the past, new PhD students would ask how they could succeed when they had to compete with the likes of say, Richard Karp or Avi Wigderson. I would say Karp and Wigderson have limited bandwidth and you can work on problems they don't work on, or think deeper about a problem than Karp or Wigderson has time to. Now we get the same question but with names like Claude and ChatGPT and it's hard to make the same bandwidth argument. What do we tell them as we get closer to Math AGI? What even is Math...

One of the most annoying parts of writing web applications is that in general: you can't trust browsers. But, you have to trust browsers at some level because that's how users interact with your software. As browsers get more capable with APIs like WebUSB , Built-in AI , or other absurd things; administrators want to be able to turn off the features that their web applications don't use. This is the crux of why Content-Security-Policies (CSPs) exist. Mara Normally we avoid acrony...

Did you know that LinkedIn caps you at 200 connection requests per week? There are a few finite resources in the world, but nothing seems as finite as LinkedIn’s connection requests. One of the easiest things I could change if I could go back in time was to spend more weeks and add everyone from my target audience to my LinkedIn list. Why? Because this would mean whenever I post something new about my product, they see it, they share it, and it increases my success with their entire netw...

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display , which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution! Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the folks at Scandent were trying to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one of the...

Sometimes the question isn’t whether you should do something, but rather whether you could. Wait, I have that the wrong way round, don’t I? Well too late, because I already ran commit on this life transaction. “Life transaction”? I have no hope. About this time last year I bought an old ThinkPad X230 for use as a dedicated writing laptop, not dissimilar in purpose to those e-ink machines other people with more sense buy. It runs NetBSD 11 , because I’m a gentleman, and Fre...

0.0 Context Setting Wednesday, August 19 2026 in Portland, Oregon. I am sitting in my study and still, inexplicably, have Def Leppard’s Hysteria on single track repeat. I have nothing to say in my defense and don’t frankly care, either. 0.1 Events Simple and quick this time: How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary this Friday 21 August at 9am Pacific , where we’ll be talking about design. Yesterday was the first Happy Hour clinic and I thought we had a bunch of fun....

So one of the things I've been trying to do as part of my journey to lose weight and get fit is sort my diet out. As the saying goes, "you can't out-train a poor diet" . And the worst part of my diet is definitely snacking in the evening. The routing generally goes: Have dinner. Put the kids to bed and settle down with my wife on the couch. Crave snacks out of habit. Get snacks and eat them! I'm the type of person who finds an arbitrary thing to aim for very motivating. It's n...

Recently, one of the websites I follow (not this one!) changed their name. Artemis , the web reader I maintain, was still using the old name for the feed. This makes sense in the case of Artemis because users can choose their own names for an author; if the author name were synced with what was published in the feed, a user’s preferences would be overwritten. With that said, I think this logic could be extended a bit. I was thinking that Artemis could track the names of a feed every time a fe...

You might be wondering why I’m already back hiking since I walked more than 40 km just a few days ago. And the answer to that is that I’m not hiking. This was a short stroll to briefly visit a church that would normally be part of the tenth and final segment of this ten-part loop. As I mentioned in my previous post, the second half of this loop is so poorly laid out that some of the churches require some crazy changes to the main path in order to be visited, and the final segment of the ...

When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re being original. Ironically, this is the best way to do truly original writing. Every important idea has been discussed already. I learned this in grad school for philosophy 1 , but it’s true across the board. Almost every field 2 has generations of very smart people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking about the biggest problems. If you try to only write abou...

Research report · Internet Archive holdings · 17 August 2026 Short answer: the engineering trade press litigated every element of the modern datacenter backup-power design between 1996 and 2010, and settled it — a standby generator plus a flywheel sized to the ~10 seconds the generator needs to start. We read ~1,950 issues of nine periodicals in the Internet Archive’s scanned collections (59 feature articles in full) while specifying a 400 kW natural-gas emergency plant, and this is wha...

Most lifestyle sites promise a better week and hand you a listicle. Thelifestyleedge com takes a narrower path. Pick one problem, follow the steps, move on. The site covers health, money, home and daily output, with sources printed next to the claims. What follows looks at each section and how to read it without losing an afternoon. What Thelifestyleedge com Covers Thelifestyleedge com publishes across four areas: health, money, home and personal output. The pages sit close together on purp...

The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit. We will be artists, scholars, captains of the starship Enterprise , etc. There’s a few problems with this idea: “Drudgery” and “meaningful work” are in the same complexity class, so the technology to automates the former also automates th...

We are all familiar with IP addresses such as 192.168.0.1 . They are typically written as four numbers in the range 0 to 255 inclusive, separated by dots. In C#, you can parse them with the standard library using IPAddress.TryParse . Pedantic people are quick to point out that IP addresses can take different forms: they can be IPv6 or IPv4 and there are many weird ways to write an IPv4 address. But for the purpose of performance optimization, we care about the common case. The common case is...

A few weeks ago a paper was shared that showed how to extract reasoning traces from closed-weight models. Together with online discussions about tricking models into leaking them, it made me investigate it more out of curiosity. Twitter seems full of half-truths and confusion about how this works, so perhaps this helps some to understand what is happening. Hiding Traces Reasoning traces are usually hidden from us. We have lamented this , but mostly have to accept it. Open-weight model...

Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very minor edits to remove disfluencies"). This is the latest version of an argument I've been trying to build about why sometimes it does make sense to talk about lines of code as an indicator of productivity with coding ag...

Anthropic recently announced that in compliance with a new EU AI generated content law, they will be watermarking content generated using their models. While there are differing opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing as well as excellent interactive explainers on how it works, I was interested in the underlying mechanics behind it. Anthropic cites SynthID-Text as their methodology which builds upon work done here . Text watermarking To summarize, at each token position, the ...

I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country , covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard armchairs, the dark wooden panels along the walls. I'm three teas deep and have a few hours of quiet to think for the first time in many months. Over the summer my baby became a rambunctious toddler, barrelling around the house and narrating our lives in his own langua...